There is no place for Planned Parenthood on campus!  Teardown their signs and expel those that hang them!

On February 11, 1944, our great uncle, Fr. Claude Heithaus, publicly challenged this University to reject racism in all its forms and to admit African-American students to campus.  But Fr. Claude did not merely issue an exhortation on the evils of racism, he called the University community to account “for the wrongs that have been done to the mystical body of Christ through the wronging of its colored members,” and that such wrongs demanded “an act of public reparation.”  The papers say that even the pews stood up as the congregation of students at the College Church prayed together “Lord Jesus, we are sorry and ashamed for the wrongs that white men have done to Your Colored children. We are firmly resolved never again to have any part in them, and to do everything in our power to prevent them.’”  In so many ways we have come so far as a SLU community in battling the evils of racism, including refusing to tolerate it in any form on campus; and yet . . .

75 years later, we are saddened that we must follow in Father Claude’s footsteps and challenge the tolerance that this University seems willing to extend to those whose eugenic and white supremacist ideologies tolerate the murder of unborn children of every race and in particular African American children.  We are disgusted and appalled that we have heard not one word from the administration condemning those who would tear out a memorial to the unborn and then hang signs around the clocktower espousing the virtues of murder and racism through the organization Planned Parenthood.  Would we witness similar silence if those signs read “KKK?”  Perhaps the University is now willing to “tolerate” Proud Boys marchingthrough campus as well?  If not (and we hope to God its “not”) then we expect the same horror expressed at those who openly espouse the murder of innocent children of every race.  Anything less is repulsive.

For those that question Planned Parenthood’s open assault on human rights, one need look no further than the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger.  Sanger – a clandestine Nazi sympathizer in the United States – wrote extensively on her desire to eliminate African Americans, whom she referred to as “feeble minded” girls and women “of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class” and who should be “segregated during the reproductive period.”  Sanger goes on to say that she prefers “the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble minded.” Planned Parenthood has not reserved its bloodlust just for African Americans, according to its founder, “Slavs, Latins, and Hebrews immigrants are human weeds, a deadweight of human waste. Blacks . . . and Jews are a menace to the human race.”  

Planned Parenthood’s devious racist strategies are expressed best by Sanger’s aspiration to “covertly invest into non-White areas, invest in ghetto abortion clinics.  Help to raise money for free abortions, in primarily non-White areas.”  This is the message of those that hung signs on the clocktower Tuesday afternoon promoting Planned Parenthood.  Dr. Amber Johnson, where is your outrage?

The Reverend Jesse Jackson railed against abortion calling it “black genocide” and comparing abortion to slavery.  According to Jackson, the idea that a baby was the personal property of the mother and she could do whatever she pleased with the child “was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned.” And at the 1977 March for Life, Jackson asked, “What happens … to the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?”  Vice President Jessica Evenson, where is this University’s pang of conscience?

Mother Theresa expressed it best when she noted that “it is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”  At a Catholic University where we work so hard to become aware of the poverty in society and our obligation to end it, we ask you Dr. Pestello, where is the horror at this pervasive poverty of racist abortion ideology that plagues so many in our community?  There is no place for tolerance of this viewpoint any more than it is acceptable to tolerate white robed Klansmen or skin-headed Nazis.  It is the duty of this administration to track down those responsible for the destruction of the memorial to the unborn and the promotion of Planned Parenthood’s racism on campus and cut this cancer from our community once and for all.

In union with our unborn brothers and sisters of every race,

Gus Heithaus and Kateri Heithaus